Bonaventure

Excerpt

him would have spent his first earnings, as other ambitious ones did, for a saddle; but 'Thanase Beausoleil had bought a fiddle.

He had hardly got it before he knew how to play it. Yet, to the father's most welcome surprise, he remained just as bold a rider and as skilful a thrower of the arriatte as ever. He came into great demand for the Saturday-night balls. When the courier with a red kerchief on a wand came galloping round, the day before, from île to île,--for these descendants of a maritime race call their homestead groves islands,--to tell where the ball was to be, he would assert, if there was even a hope of it, that 'Thanase was to be the fiddler.